RAD1901 is a selective estrogen receptor down-regulator/degrader, or SERD, that crosses the blood-brain barrier and is particularly useful for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer. RAD1901 has been shown to bind with good selectivity to the estrogen receptor (ER) and to have both estrogen-like and estrogen-antagonistic effect in different tissues. In many cancers, hormones, like estrogen, stimulate tumor growth, and thus a desired therapeutic goal is to block this estrogen-dependent growth while inducing apoptosis of the cancer cells. SERDs have the potential to be an emerging class of endocrine therapies that could directly induce ER degradation, thus potentially enabling them to remove the estrogen growth signal in ER-dependent tumors without allowing ligand-independent resistance to develop.